By Debbie Cerda — As part of our Orbiter Year-Round Series, Other Worlds Austin SciFi Film Festival is presenting the Texas premiere of DIRECTOR’S COMMENTARY: TERROR OF FRANKENSTEIN this Thursday, August 25 at 9:00 pm at Flix Brewhouse. Co-writer/Director Tim Kirk will do a Q&A via Skype after the screening. Tickets are available via this link.

Having been oddly fascinated by the TERROR OF FRANKENSTEIN when I first watched it as a teen in the late 1970s, I'm thrilled to see filmmakers putting on a new twist to English author's Mary Shelley classic tale of a scientist obsessed with bringing non-living matter to life. Shelley's novel "Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus," published in 1818, is considered to be the first true Science Fiction story and has influenced both Science Fiction and Horror genres of literature, film, and television.

Almost two hundred titles exist on IMDb alone with "Frankenstein" in the name, with various interpretations over the last century by directors and screenwriters. Several films influenced by Shelley's novel -- as well as the circumstances and phantasmagoria surrounding her writing -- have left a lasting impression with me. While not all these films are highly rated, the premise of these recommendations are worth viewing for any Frankenstein fans.

Director Mel Brooks considers his best film to be this 1974 American Horror comedy starring Gene Wilder as a descendant of the infamous Dr. Victor Frankenstein. Wilder came up with the idea behind YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN while working with Brooks on BLAZING SADDLES, and Brooks and he co-wrote the screenplay. The phenomenal supporting cast includes Teri Garr, Cloris Leachman, Marty Feldman, Peter Boyle, Madeline Kahn, Kenneth Mars, Richard Haydn and Gene Hackman.

Shot in glorious black-and-white, the comedy serves as both a spoof

The Team

Bears Fonté

Founder and Artistic Director

Don Elfant

Director of Marketing and Development

Jordan Brown

Associate Artistic Director

Debbie Cerda

Programmer and Hospitality Director

Courtney Hazlett

Programmer and Director of Operations

Reid Lansford

Programmer and Registration Director

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Tessa Morrison

Programmer and Outreach Director

Dan Repp

Senior Programmer and Events Director

Margaux Ryndak

Sponsorship Director

Michael Thielvoldt

Programmer and Tour Director

and a tribute to the some of Brooks' favorite Universal Horror classics — 1931's "Frankenstein" and 1935's "The Bride of Frankenstein," both directed by James Whale, and 1939's "Son of Frankenstein," directed by Rowland V. Lee — with Boris Karloff as the infamous monster.

Wilder portrayed Dr. Frederick Frankenstein, a neurosurgeon who constantly attempts to separate himself from his family legacy. However, when he visits his grandfather's laboratory in his ancestral castle in Europe, he is inspired to create his own monster (Peter Boyle).

In a 2014 interview with the Los Angeles Times regarding the 40th anniversary of YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN, Brooks stated:

"I didn't want it to be just funny or silly. I wanted Mary Shelley's basic feelings captured and

the... haunting beautiful quality that James Whale got with Boris Karloff. My movies are not

about jokes. They are about behavior, and behavior can be very funny."

By Bears Fonte — August 31st will be ‘Fade Out’ on this year’s SciFi Screenwriting Contest. Sponsored by No BullScript Consulting, the best feature, teleplay, and short will receive a Development Notes Phone Consultation with Danny Manus, CEO of No BullScript Consulting, a top 15 script consultant according to Creative Screenwriting. In addition, the top feature, teleplay, and short will win $250, with the grand prize winner taking home an additional $250. More information can be found here.

Last year’s winner was teleplay pilot JEN-16 by Craig Berger in which a genetically engineered teenage superweapon must lead a group of misfits through a brave new world when they escape from a secret Russian laboratory.

Teleplays have a bit of an advantage, though, when it comes to that final page, because they don’t have to tie anything up. Sure, you want that opening episode to feel complete and resolved, but the main goal is to leave readers wanting more. Feature writers not only have to supply a satisfying conclusion, but in SciFi, that often includes world building and lots of backstory.

So just how many pages do writers have in which to do it? If you look at screenwriting books written twenty years ago, almost uniformly they declared the same: 120 pages. The first book I remember offering another recommendation (and in fact an entire rubric based around it) was Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat which called for 110 pages.

For years we’ve been told one page of script equals one minute of screen time. Is this true? Well, yes and no. It’s all about pacing. The first cut of my 102 page feature was 144 minutes. After much editing and scene cutting, the final running time… 102 minutes. The reality is your page count has little to do with actual running time of a final film. So why not make it 150 pages? If this is an Aaron Sorkin style film in which everyone talks really fast, then you can cram 150 pages into 100 minutes. But you are probaby not Aaron Sorkin… at least not yet.

Here is the thing that most unproduced writers don’t think about enough: your screenplay is not really a film. Shocking, right? If you are at the stage in your career where you are entering contests, writing query letters or leaving unsolicited submissions under car windshield wipers at the Marina Del Ray Yacht Club, your unproduced screenplay is not really a film, it is a proof of your writing ability.

Your spec feature (or spec teleplay really as well) proves that you can tell a compelling story according to industry standards. It should look professional, use proper formatting, be free of spelling errors, and be 90 to 110 pages. Your main goal is that you want someone to read it. And that by the end of reading it, still think you can write.

Of course, a contest has to read your script (it wouldn’t be very ethical if they didn’t), but a spec script should be written so that when it does win a contest and gets to an industry decision-maker, it is ready to impress. No one in the industry wants to read your 170 page epic. And that 70 page feature is always going to feel slight.

Screenwriting is a job - it may not pay like one, but you have to treat it as such. Just like a sous-chef has to cook the head chef’s menu and an electrician works as an apprentice for years before joining the union, your spec screenplay is your proof that you can do the job before you get the job. In fact, it would be doing the writer a disservice for a screenplay contest (ours included) to raise up an entry that does not meet industry standards. It may make the writer some prize money, but they won’t get past the next gate keepers, the ones that really matter.

So if your screenplay is longer than 120 pages or shorter than 90 is it even worth entering a contest? Of course it is. Especially if the contest offers feedback (as ours and many others do), because this can help you hone down your script to its essence. If contests announce finalists, that can be the encouragement you need to keep at it on the rough days. And of course, your screenplay might be the one that is so good, it proves this entire blog wrong. I hope it is.

by MICHAEL THIELVOLDT — On December 17, 2009, SciFi, cinema, and the world lost a keen mind and a sharp pen. It was a Thursday and his name was Dan O’Bannon. If the name Dan O’Bannon doesn’t immediately ring familiar, then you have some homework to do. For in his 63 years on this little blue ball, O’Bannon helped push the limits of science fiction and horror, often by melding one into the other, ultimately elevating both. This year, Other Worlds Austin is excited to announce the Dan O’Bannon Award, a $1,500 grant co-sponsored by the O’Bannon Company, for the production or post-production of a short film to an emerging Texas filmmaker who exhibits an equal passion for Science Fiction. For more information on the grant, or to enter, check out the Dan O’Bannon Award page on our website.

O'Bannon was an idea man, pure and simple, whose first significant contribution came in a collaboration with genre film auteur and classmate John Carpenter during their time at the University of Southern California film school. Together they conceived and co-wrote a student short film about an intergalactic cleanup crew scouring the universe in search of unstable planets to destroy.

If this premise sounds familiar, that is likely because Carpenter and O’Bannon expanded on the narrative a few years later resulting in the 1974 feature DARK STAR. For DARK STAR O’Bannon would step in front of the camera in a rare acting turn as the film’s comic relief, crew bombardier Sgt. Pinback. Not content to only co-create, co-write, and act, O’Bannon additionally served as the picture’s editor and special effects supervisor. This latter work drew the attentions of Alejandro Jodorowsky, who put O’Bannon to work on the development of his now fabled DUNE project. While the project never came to fruition, the experience brought O’Bannon face-to-face with a later seminal collaborator in Swiss surrealist H.R. Giger, the artist most popularly known for designing the creatures and environments of the ALIEN franchise. Eventually O’Bannon’s special effects would also catch the eye of the young writer-director George Lucas, who hired O’Bannon to put his talents to work on a little picture titled STAR WARS. By the end of the decade O’Bannon would have another SciFi classic under his belt with the earth-shattering premiere of ALIEN in 1979.

ALIEN is a behemoth of SciFi lineage. The original film would spawn a series of sequels, prequels, and spinoffs that have yet to meet their end, making it one of the most lasting, beloved, and

successful SciFi properties of all time. The original is a master class picture for countless formal and narrative considerations. Its minimalist soundtrack, expert control of tone, and claustrophobic camera are legendary, the orchestration of which have rightfully earned director Ridley Scott a permanent place in the pantheon of SciFidom. The alien design work put forth by Giger, from the fleshy, pulsating eggs to the almost sexually-violating facehuggers, the body-horror-inducing chestbursters, and right up to the sleek, shimmering, salivating, insectile xenomorphs are the stuff of our nightmares. Still, the endless success of this film and those to follow all owe tribute to the scribbled words of Dan O’Bannon who, with story work by Ronald Shusett, first breathed life into this world by cobbling together a number of past writing projects into one of the most fully realized screenplays one is likely to come across. Add to the list of debtors one Sigourney Weaver, who landed the lead role in the film and ultimately the franchise. O’Bannon famously wrote the crew characters as sexually non-descript, the choice of which opened up the possibilities to cast actress Weaver as the iconic feminist action character, Ellen Ripley.

Toward the end of the 1970s, O’Bannon’s writing spilled beyond the pages of screenplays and onto the pages of the French SciFi-horror comic METAL HURLANT. We west of the Atlantic know this publication as HEAVY METAL, the cultural stew of seventies era debauchery in which genre forms meld with psychedelic, rocker aesthetics, and enough punkish penciled pornography to titillate the inner 12-year-old boy in all of us. As a longtime fan of EC Comics, the horror-SciFi publisher most noted for its TALES FROM THE CRYPT titles and for fighting government and industry attempts to censor comic book content in the 40s and 50s, O’Bannon’s voice found a rightful home at HEAVY METAL. His first story “The Long Tomorrow,” illustrated by French cartoonist Moebius, debuted in the French version of the magazine in 1976 and resurfaced in American issues the following year. The story is a futuristic cop tale, which has been identified as one of the earliest contributions to the time’s rising cyberpunk infatuation and a direct influence on Scott’s second major SciFi foray, BLADE RUNNER. O’Bannon’s relationship with HEAVY METAL would bring him along when the pages of the comic book turned toward the silver screen in 1981’s HEAVY METAL animated film. The picture opens with an astronaut navigating a classic Corvette convertible through space and to a successful landing on earth. The segment, written by O’Bannon, is actually an adaptation of a story he wrote for the publication in 1979, both titled “Soft Landing.” The feature film stayed true to form showcased outlandish narrative oddities like space coke-snorting alien pilots, taxicab death rays, Lovecraftian Easter eggs, countless pairs of illustrated, gravity defying DDs, and robot sex, ushered along by an apocalyptic orb known as the Loc-Nar, whose evil has plagued the universe for centuries. O’Bannon also wrote a later segment about a WWII bomber plane that becomes infested by zombified versions of its recently deceased crew. This story ends in a beautifully sardonic moment of helplessness when the lone remaining pilot realizes he has survived his zombied crew only to find himself face to face with a whole undead army.

By Jordan Brown — With all of the things happening in the world in 2016 thus far, let’s appreciate that the year has also offered a welcome reprieve with a renaissance of the ever-popular, ever-awesome trope of “kid with special powers” in film. This gives me an excuse to finally write about M83’s Trilogy.

MAD MAX: FURY ROAD AND EX MACHINA - TWO SIDES OF THE SAME APOCALYPTIC COIN

By Anuj Bhutani — Isn’t it plausible that present attitudes towards women combined with technological advances as shown in EX MACHINA could be the “before” of some apocalyptic event that leads to the “after” world of MAD MAX where fertile women are held as breeding slaves by a tyrant who controls what scarce natural resources are left?

SCIFI SCREENWRITING SUCCESS STORIES

By Don Elfant — There is more than one way to skin a cat (boy, that’s a terrible expression) and there is more than one path to make it as a screenwriter. Some of the most famous SciFi screenwriters had humble beginnings. Some got into screenwriting from distinctly non Hollywood jobs. Others were practically born into it.